Hague court convicts Taylor of war crimes in Sierra Leone (Reuters) - A United Nations-backed court convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, the first time a head of state has been found guilty by an international tribunal since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.

Taylor, 64, had been charged with 11 counts of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, during which more than 50,000 people were killed.

The first African leader to stand trial for war crimes, Taylor was accused of directing Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in a campaign of terror to plunder Sierra Leone's diamond mines for profit and weapons trading.

By Joel Roberts
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson accused President Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels" by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.

"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation’s economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

~snip~

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

“We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that have allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. It’s time we stopped it.”

--Ronald Reagan

#!

According to Republicans when Ronald Reagan argued for the Buffett Rule it was a high point in the history of capitalism, but when Barack Obama makes the exact same argument, it is socialism. Why wasn’t it socialism in 1985 when St. Ronnie of Jellybean was advocating for it?

It appears that Republicans have forgotten half of Ronald Reagan’s message. The then president did sell the fulfillment of the American dream through tax cuts, but he didn’t want to cut taxes for everyone. Reagan was also a wealth redistributor. He championed the virtues of lowering taxes for everyone but the super-rich. Ronald Reagan raised taxes eleven times, and in seven of the eight years that he was in office. In contrast, President Obama is the biggest tax cutter in American history.

As Republicans get set to vote on the Buffett Rule, they would be wise to revisit their roots and win one for the Socialist.

Just six months after 9/11 and three months after bin Laden evaded capture at Tora Bora, Bush personally began downplaying the importance of capturing al-Qaeda’s leader. “I don’t know where he is,” Bush told a news conference. “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”

Yet, with bin Laden at large, Bush enjoyed an advantage. He could use the specter of bin Laden as an all-purpose bogeyman to scare the American people. A living bin Laden allowed Bush to create a plausible scenario for additional al-Qaeda attacks inside the United States and thus the justification for Bush to assert unprecedented powers as Commander in Chief.

Bush also cited the continued threat from bin Laden to stampede the American people and Congress into supporting the invasion of Iraq. One of Bush’s key arguments was that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein might share weapons of mass destruction with bin Laden’s operatives. Most Americans weren’t aware that Hussein, a secularist, and bin Laden, a fundamentalist, were mortal enemies in the Islamic world.

Bush kept the American people in line as his administration touched off periodic panics over terrorism by pushing the color-coded warnings up the threat spectrum.

Colorado’s Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has just fired its first big advertising salvo, and it looks to be an effective one.

A new billboard unveiled Thursday by the group just blocks away from Mile High Stadium in Denver shows a smiling woman with her arms folded, next to the text: “For many reasons, I prefer… marijuana over alcohol. Does that make me a bad person? http://regulatemarijuana.org/